A rapist had smoked the Kool in a suburban St. Louis apartment in 1982
after assaulting his victim at least three times at knifepoint.

He told her his name was John Briscoe.

The real Johnny Briscoe had been at his mother's place 17 miles away
watching the World Series the night of the attack.

Police pulled him into a lineup — the only of four men wearing a
jailhouse jumpsuit.

"Halloween orange," he notes.

The victim incorrectly identified Briscoe. He refused a plea deal
offering 20 years in prison. And then he was convicted, sentenced in
his mid-20s to 45 years behind bars.

"How did I become part of that? That nightmare?" he says. "They just
walked over me, man."

In prison, Briscoe befriended an inmate named Steve Toney who was
prosecuted by the same district attorney and represented by the same
defense lawyer for a rape he, too, didn't commit. Toney told him about
DNA evidence and its potential to exonerate the wrongly convicted.
Missouri freed Toney in 1996 after he proved his innocence through DNA.

Briscoe's appeal also lent itself to testing because police had
gathered so much evidence: a rape kit; hairs believed to be the
rapist's; a bedsheet, towel and pantyhose stained with semen; and three
cigarette butts collected from the victim's ashtray. A St. Louis County
Crime Lab report written the week of the rape stated that "the
cigarette butts will be retained in the laboratory freezer for possible
future comparison."

For three years in the mid-1990s, Briscoe's lawyer tried to prod the
St. Louis County district attorney's office to find the items. At
first, prosecutors refused even to look.

"We will neither conduct searches of our records nor turn over
information unless subsequently ordered by a court to do so," wrote
J.D. Evans, St. Louis County's first assistant prosecutor.
Innocence Project attorneys gave up on Briscoe in 1998.

He then turned to Jim McCloskey, founder of the New Jersey-based
Centurion Ministries, a group known as the desperate man's Innocence
Project because it champions cases even without DNA.

Writing that he would stake his life on Briscoe's innocence, McCloskey
persuaded Evans to conduct two evidence searches in 2000.

The St. Louis Police Crime Laboratory reported that "all of the
evidence had been destroyed." And the St. Louis County Crime Laboratory
claimed it had searched its freezer and also concluded Briscoe's
evidence had been tossed.

After another, court-ordered search in 2002, the St. Louis County
Police's Bureau of Criminal Identification wrote that workers again
"failed to locate any evidence associated with Mr. Briscoe" in the lab
freezer.

"Year after year after year after year after year. Nothing. Nothing. No
evidence," Briscoe says.

In April 2004, a power failure shut down the lab freezer. That
triggered an inventory of the items stored there, including the
cigarette butts from Briscoe's case. No one at the lab connected them
to the court-ordered search two years earlier. They continued to sit
unnoticed in the freezer until November 2005.

That's when Toney spoke at a conference about his experiences as a
wrongfully convicted lifer saved by DNA testing. He mentioned his buddy
Johnny as one of many innocent convicts wasting away because of lost
evidence.

Sitting in the audience was a St. Louis County crime-lab supervisor
whom Toney inspired to order yet another search of the freezer. And
there they were — three cigarette butts in the same place records show
they were stored 23 years earlier.

Testing found that two bore the victim's DNA profile. But the third was
a mixture of saliva from the victim and, prosecutors announced, a man
named Larry Smith.

Briscoe had known Smith from his neighborhood before his arrest.

Smith, it turns out, was serving time in the same prison for the rape
of a woman in the same apartment complex as the victim assaulted in
Briscoe's case.

Through the prison grapevine, Briscoe heard he was doing time for
Smith.

"I approached him and asked him about it. He said, 'No, man, Johnny, I
wouldn't do you like that.' So here in 2006 the record shows that he
did do me like that. He did that. Larry did do that," he says.

Last summer, Briscoe hadn't been told that his evidence was found nor,
prosecutors said, that DNA tests matched Smith.

By then Briscoe had done 24 years behind bars and been denied parole
because
he refused to express remorse for a crime he didn't commit. He was
slated to go before the parole board once again in September 2006. This
time, he was desperate. He told his mother and sister during a visit
last July that he would say he was sorry.

"It went against everything I am, my whole being. But I was tired. I
was at the edge," he says.

Two months before the parole hearing, two DA's investigators showed up
at prison and handed Briscoe an envelope. In it was a long, white swab
used for DNA sampling.

Slowly, Briscoe rolled it around his gums and the roof of his mouth and
under his tongue.

"They said in 24 hours we'll be back with the results. And the results
were beautiful," he says.

Though the DNA on the cigarette butts was "good enough" to clear
Briscoe, Evans, the prosecutor, said "it had degraded too much to
convict Smith."

Now exonerated of all charges, Briscoe is living with his mother on St.
Louis' north side and trying to mend his relationship with Lynette
Briscoe, his wife at the time of his arrest whom he forced to divorce
him so she could move on.

He is trying to make up for time lost with his daughter and son, who
were 7 and 2 when he went to prison. He now has four grandchildren.

"I know they missed out on a lot. I did too. So we're trying to
rekindle this relationship and just move forward," he says. "My people.
I'm trying to know my people, man"

Briscoe lost nearly half his 52 years to a justice system that refused
to see his innocence.

A year after his exoneration, he is both tickled by and uneasy with his
freedom, leery of walking to the store or wandering too far from home.
He remains incredulous of the twists his path has taken and mindful,
always, of how fragile fate can be.

"Never in a million years," he says, would he have imagined his life
could hinge on saliva soaked into a 24-year-old menthol.

"Cigarette butts?" he laughs. "I didn't think so. But yes, it could
happen like that."